


Lifetime

by AshwinMeird



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Adoptive Parent Bobby Singer, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bar Owner Castiel, Bar Owner Dean Winchester, Dead Mary, Dean Deserves to be Happy, Dean's Happy Ending, Dean's Terrible Life, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, John Dies BTW, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Long-Term Relationship, M/M, Marriage Proposal, dean deserves nice things, dean is sam's parent, supportive friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28973004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshwinMeird/pseuds/AshwinMeird
Summary: Dean Winchester's life starts off well, then his mother dies and it all goes downhill until Dean takes control of his life again and finds his happy ending.This is canon parallel until Sam goes to Stanford and Dean gets the good life he should have gotten all along.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 7
Kudos: 84





	Lifetime

**Author's Note:**

> Erm, this is not the most Sam friendly fic ever, so Sam fans be warned I guess but it's not that bad and he redeems himself.
> 
> Also this was going to be my fic for Dean's birthday, it still is but it turned out a lot less fluffy than I though.

The first four years of Dean’s life had been great. Or that’s what he always told himself based off of the few memories he had of the time and the surviving photos.

Those and John’s drunken ramblings.

They were a normal family back then; two parents and their son, two sons after Sammy came along, living an apple pie life in Lawrence Kansas. Dean went to daycare and was babysat by Missouri while his mom was at work as an investigative journalist and his dad as a mechanic at a small shop.

It all changed after the fire that took Mary.

The fire started in Sammy’s nursery, or so they thought. It actually started with a faulty wire in the fuse box two floors below and traveled through the walls before becoming visible in that room. The cause of the fire wasn’t discovered, though, until months after John took his kids and left town.

From what Dean knows, Mary got Sam out of his crib and handed him to John through a wall of fire that was starting to cover the doorway to the hall. Sammy was frantically handed to Dean, and Dean was told to run from the house.

Dean stood in the front yard as fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and many neighbors flooded the street in front of their house. At one point Sam was taken from his arms and the two brothers were checked out by EMT’s.

John was pulled out of the house not long after on a stretcher, and Mary via body bag.

Lots of people offered condolences, food, childcare. Anything that John could look for in those following weeks as people do in close neighborhoods.

He didn’t care though, John was convinced that someone Mary wrote a piece about had come to their house to exact revenge. Or so he said, Dean always just thought that his father died that night with Mary and this is all that was left of him.

Her wake was a week after the fire.

Her funeral two days later.

John took what little possessions they had left, sold everything he deemed unnecessary, and packed it into the trunk of the impala along with whatever money the neighbors had pitched together to ‘help them rebuild’.

Dean left Lawrence less than a fortnight after they lost Mary.

Dean doesn’t remember much of the first few years. They were just the gradual decline of John Winchester.

At first John made sure to find some poor schmuck in each town they ‘moved’ to, to watch Sam and Dean while he was gone. John would get something resembling an actual job and he’d look for ‘cases’ resembling the fire that took Dean’s mother until he gave up and moved them to the next place.

Dean knew his father was acting weird, but he never said anything. He just learned when to avoid John because he was too drunk and he made sure to keep Sammy safe like dad told him to.

That was the only piece of his dad’s advice that Dean ever actually accepted.

By the time Dean was eight his dad started to put more responsibility on him, John would leave Dean alone to watch Sam for longer and longer periods of time. He started to teach Dean how to cook and how to keep a motel room or dingy apartment acceptably clean for them to get their deposit back in full.

It became Dean’s responsibility to find someone to watch Sammy while he was in school. It became Dean’s responsibility to keep Sammy fed and happy. It became Dean’s responsibility to pretend that all of this was normal so people wouldn’t ask the wrong- the _right_ \- questions.

His dad would stumble back home every few days, demand that they pack up everything every few months, and tell Dean that he was a good kid every few years.

When Sammy started to go to school Dean had to start to teach him how to read their dad’s mood, so Sam would never have to learn the hard way like Dean did. Sam didn’t like it though, school was teaching him that their family was wrong and that their dad shouldn’t act like that.

Dean knew all of that though. Of course he did. But they didn’t have any other option than to make the best of it before Dean could figure out some way to get his little brother to a good place.

Sam wasn’t happy about it but he learned, for a few short years, not to confront John and to act like their lives were normal. All because that’s what Dean told him to do.

Dean made sure that Sam was happy though. He helped the kid with schoolwork, and made sure that Sam got to playdates and school events, made sure to do something every holiday regardless of their dad’s whereabouts.

He drug himself through elementary, and eventually middle school, before he really started to give a shit about his education. John was away again, he made sure to remind Dean to take care of Sam and not do anything for himself in not as many words, and Sam was at a friend's house when Dean decided to actually read the book his English teacher assigned him.

For the majority of his public school education Dean had just floated through by simply understanding all of the math and science given to him and he also figured out how to make his other classes as easy as possible by just getting the work done in class and enjoying whatever free time that left him in school.

The book was _The Outsiders_ by S.E. Hinton and Dean read almost all of it that first night. He found himself relating to Ponyboy and how he felt like an outsider, in both his family and to the world.

Dean had never really given books a chance before that, he was always too busy taking care of Sammy, and his dad whenever he was home, to sit down and read. Sam liked books though, mostly the ones based on true stories because Sam was a humanitarian like that. Dean liked the book, so he thought he’d give reading a shot.

When his teacher mentioned a similar book a few days later, Dean found himself in the school library grabbing it off of the shelf to read while Sam slept that night.

He kept any book he read hidden though. Dean only had them because not living in his own head for a few hours was fun, he was never going to tell that to Sam or his dad though. John would just remind Dean that he was destined for a life of menial labor and Sam already knew he was smarter than a lot of people.

As Dean moved into high school he watched as Sam started to push back against their dad, he would yell and bitch and just anger John however he saw fit.

Dean tried to keep the peace. He had been the kingpin in their family for his whole life and he wasn’t stopping then. He would try and keep Sam and John from interacting as much as possible, and when he didn’t he would just try to keep everyone alive.

High school meant harder classes, and Dean had actually gotten the grades to be in mostly academic courses depending on what school they were at at the time. He never told anyone that it had been years since Dean started doing all of the school paper work for each of his and Sam’s transfers so no one was going to find out.

Dean really only took those classes because the general ones always bored him, and he figured that he was allowed to do something for himself for once.

After his freshmen year was half over, John’s trips were averaging at over a month a piece so they were starting to stay in a single place for a fractionally longer period of time. That was good for Sammy, to be able to keep friendships longer and not have to keep playing catch-up in all of his classes.

Dean had given up on the friendship thing a long time before. Back in middle school at the latest because it was hard to make friends with seventh and eighth graders when you had long since past their maturity level.

He still spoke to people during school though, whoever was sitting beside him in class or one of the few people he’d talk to in the hallways. High schools weren’t nearly as cruel to new students as movies would lead you to believe; you were really just a shiny new thing for a few days before you just were there like anyone else.

Dean continued on like that, he’d go to class and spend whatever break time he had finishing school work so he didn’t have to do all of it after Sam went to sleep.

Sam was in middle school and constantly telling Dean that he was ‘independent’ and ‘not a baby’ and that he didn’t need Dean trying to crowd into his life all of the time before Dean got his first job.

Despite John teaching him how to work in the labor industry since he was a kid, Dean found his first job stocking shelves because, astonishingly, places like that would actually employ a sixteen year old.

It was only a couple hours a night a few days a week, and Dean asked one of the neighbors in whatever town they were in to keep an eye on Sam from a distance, but he was still twitching with worry over his little brother.

Having a job, in constantly changing positions as they moved around, meant that Dean had even less time in the day. He would still go to school and make sure Sam was fed and got wherever he needed to be, and read whenever he had a few minutes between all of that and his ever growing amount of schoolwork.

Sam didn’t understand though. He tried to pretend he did, but the kid was exactly that: a kid, so the complexities of Dean’s daily life always eluded him.

To start with, Sam believed John whenever he said that Dean wasn’t smart. And maybe Dean never had Sam’s effortless genius, but he was still getting high grades in all of his academic classes and had been helping Sam do his homework up until recently when Sam decided it had become too hard for Dean.

Sam also started to get mad at Dean for acting like a carbon copy of their dad.

Dean knew he dressed like John, after all the jacket he always wears used to belong to him and so did most of Dean’s clothes, but that was mostly because Dean didn’t have the luxury of someone to look out for him and make sure he got to have the things he asked for.

He didn’t mind wearing John’s hammy downs though, Dean liked all of the bands on the old t-shirts and the worn jeans never bothered him. Plus the guy with the leather jacket was always the cool one in movies; like Indiana Jones or Danny Zuko.

Dean actually had a long list of characters with leather jackets, he had watched many movies since he started supplementing actual human interaction for film over the past couple of years.

Sam liked to use that as another point against Dean, but Dean let him think what he wanted because it was better Sam dislike him for dumb reasons than anything Dean actually cared about.

John was never home. Sam spent more time in his books than he did pretending that Dean was an actual person. His teachers stopped being impressed that he was smart once high school hit.

Dean needed some form of positive reinforcement or praise.

He found it in the form of a girl named Robin in a little town in New York state. Dean had developed a small crush on her while he was in town, she was cute and sweet, and he was pretty sure that she liked him back if the kiss she gave him on a bench at the park was any indication.

She would thank him for things, even the meaningless gestures like making sure she didn’t fall over or holding the door open for her, and give him compliments for just being himself. Dean always reciprocated, after he learned that declining a compliment was not normal, because she was the kind of person that deserved that kind of praise.

John moved them not that long after, but Dean never forgot the two short weeks he spent with Robin and he soon started to look for that sort of attention again.

The girls after her didn’t care much about Dean’s personality, especially after he figured out that small town girls were always interested in fresh meat and he didn’t care if the praise he received was for his body or his personality so long as he got it.

John found out about Dean’s extracurriculars about a year later; he just gave Dean a pat on the back and told him not to get a chick pregnant. Sam was less amused, he kept telling Dean that he was being immature and messing with girls’ feelings.

Dean wasn’t though. They got the same thing out of it that he did. He and a girl would find a secluded spot, usually in the back of her car or sometimes in her house, they would fool around and go as far as she was interested in, praise and compliments on skill and technique would be exchanged and Dean would leave with a parting kiss.

None of them thought of him as anything more than a one night stand, he made sure of it.

His routine of school, work, feeding Sam, and whatever he could do in the little free time he carved for himself in his life started to feel like he was becoming too compliant in his own life. It had been months since he picked up a book and everything else that he was doing was what John wanted him to do.

Dean didn’t want to defy his father’s wishes, he knew better than that, but he needed something to remain sane. To remind himself that he’s his own person.

Not long after that was the first time Dean screwed a guy.

He had always been aware of his interest in dudes, but girls were less risky and he thought for a long time that it would go away.

It didn’t though and Dean found himself cornering Lee Webb between classes one day, telling him to meet in a well known hook up spot just outside of town later that week.

Lee was just a one time thing, like all of the others, he just also opened Dean’s eyes to a whole new selection of people that he shared a fun evening with. He kept his dalliances with guys much more well hidden than the ones with girls, but that was just what he had to do.

Dean was approaching his senior year and things were no better at home. John was only ever around long enough for them to move and to give Dean the bare minimum for bills and buying essentials. Sam was fully invested in his hatred of John and would make that perfectly clear anytime their father was around. 

That hate also blurred onto Dean sometimes, but that wasn’t entirely unwarranted on Sam’s part because Dean never could figure out how to make things any better than they were then.

Once Dean started his graduating year John seemed surprised, and a little annoyed, that Dean was still bothering to be there and hadn’t just quit to start working at a garage or something similar. Dean had finally made a plan though. One that would get him free of the life his father wanted for him while still being there for Sammy.

Dean planned on doing online university classes until Sam graduated, then they would both be free from John and Dean could pursue an actual career.

Senior year was the most work Dean had really put into anything. Dean still spent a large portion of his time making sure Sam ate and got out of the house once and awhile, he worked almost thirty hours a week to compensate for the depleting amounts John was sending them recently, and since Sam was a freshman Dean had to find even better places to hide while he did his school work.

When they were nearing the first semester exams, Dean all but stopped meeting up with anyone and Sam decided to smugly tell Dean that he was proud of him for growing up a little.

Sam had a girlfriend named Ava, she was nice and everything, but all she did was inflate Sam’s ego and Sam never really reciprocated. Dean did try to give Sam pointers on how to be a good partner but Sam wasn’t willing to take advice from someone who ‘doesn’t really care about girls’.

Dean gets acceptance letters from several Universities that are willing to give him financial help and allow him to take a selection of classes online for the next few years. He’s proud of himself, because his whole family but him, maybe even him, didn’t believe that he would even graduate at all.

Once again he doesn’t tell anyone, that would defeat the whole purpose of not telling them he was applying in the first place. When he finally uses funds from the small savings account he made himself years ago, it’s much smaller than the one he made for Sammy, to pay the first part of his payment plan ahead of time it starts to feel real.

His final semester flies by, they haven’t been moving much lately so Dean can easily ride out the whole thing at one school for once. Sam doesn’t ask if Dean’s planning on going to university, only if Dean is switching to full time at the garage he’s been working at or just getting a second job.

Dean doesn’t go to his graduation ceremony. He collects the necessary papers the day after and never looks back.

As a present for graduating, but Dean really knows it’s for going full time at work so John doesn’t have to send them money anymore, he is gifted the Impala by his dad. The car’s a bit beaten up after all the years and stress John has put it through, but Dean’s boss at the garage is happy to let him fix it up there if Dean’s willing to use the restoration for advertising.

From the day he finished his last high school exam Dean starts to work full time on top of taking four classes online with typical university amounts of course load. Its exhausting, but he likes what he’s doing at the garage and his boss is pretty chill about when Dean can work and he is enjoying most of his classes.

He doesn’t really know what he wants to do yet so his classes are quite varied, but he really enjoys his modern lit class and is considering going further with that.

Between Sam’s tenth and eleventh grades they only move three times, and one happens over summer break. Sammy’s pissy any time John moves them because he’s trying to get into Stanford and cannot lose any grades because of shuffling across the country.

Dean tries not to take it to heart when Sam says scholarships are his only way of getting into university because they don’t have the money anyway. It’s both a dig at John for poor fathering and at Dean for his ‘inability’ to get into university.

It wouldn’t matter if Sam knew about Dean’s online classes, he would still find some part of Dean to critique just so Sam continued to believe that he was the black sheep that was better than Dean and John.

When Sam starts getting replies from universities in his senior year Dean isn’t surprised. He’s always known that the kid is bright, but he never thought that Sam would really want to go into law.

It was apparently too much for Dean to hope that Sammy wanted to even stay in the same arena as Dean, let alone on the same playing field.

Sam wants to be a lawyer to get away from the shitty motels and cheap everything that Dean has worked his hardest to provide. Dean knows that Sam is looking to jump a few rax brackets to separate him from his family once and for all.

He and Sam are civil during Sam’s final months at home, but they are far from what they used to be when Sam actually thought Dean was more than a shitty brother, or a shitty father volume 2.

When Sam graduates John is there. He’s not nearly as drunk as Dean has seen him, but not sober either.

Sam only seems annoyed at his presence and ignores it up until Sam is packing things into a bag that afternoon. John is annoyed that Sam is leaving them and slurring on about how he expected Sam to work a proper American job, like Dean.

Dean only flinches mildly when John compares Dean to a younger version of himself.

Sam isn’t having any of it though and yells and curses John out, until their father slinks away to some old beat up truck to go find the nearest bar.

After that Dean and Sam do not speak. They made a plan beforehand about Dean dropping Sam at the airport and just going back to the sidelines of Sam’s life.

Sam was not surprised when Dean showed him the bank account Dean set up for Sam’s rent and other expenses because Sam managed to snag a full scholarship for himself, he looks so unsurprised in fact, that Dean wonders if he had been expecting Dean to do this for him all along.

Once Sam is gone the apartment they’d been staying in feels even less like home than it had previously.

John comes home later that night, drunk enough that Dean just lets him pass out on the couch knowing that he couldn’t even be forced awake for the next seven or eight hours.

Dean packs up everything in the house. It’s something he had done more times than he can count, but organizing everything he has ever called his own into a few boxes feels therapeutic now that he knows this will be one of the last times he has to move.

Once his stuff is in the back of the Impala, Dean gets to work on preparing the apartment to be put back on the market. He packs the last few things he didn’t need, or want, into a couple of boxes that he places by the door and scrubs everything clean like he was taught to as a kid.

All the perishable food was given to an older man a floor down that Dean knows rarely buys fresh food for himself, and the non perishables are split between the Impala and whatever Dean didn’t want was stuffed in one of the boxes by the door.

His last order of business is to work out all of the paperwork for John to send in. The apartment was placed under Dean’s name, as had every one since he turned eighteen, so Dean signed the papers saying they no longer owned the place and left them on the coffee table next to a glass of water and a couple pills for John to find in the morning.

Dean had gone to the landlord two weeks before to inform her that they would be leaving. He went to a bank a week before to transfer all of the money out of a joint account and split it proportionally between one's for him, John, and Sam to each individually access.

As one final act of selfishness, Dean deleted his number from John’s phone. He would remember it.

Let him go through Sam if he needed something.

Actually attending university is an odd experience for Dean. He only just graduated a few years ago, but he feels out of place in a scholarly environment.

It only took a few lessons before Dean starts to feel like he actually belongs there. He is taking a lot of English classes and he figured out a while back that analyzing literature was not that much different from diagnosing a car. You have to know what to look for with both and there are a lot of things that are very frequent to happen.

Dean was still talking to Sam on the phone a couple of times a week, his brother seemed to be doing fine in California and in his classes. Their conversations seemed to be short and stilted though, and Sam rarely did anything but answer Dean’s questions and blame his sour mood on school work.

Dean slowly started to call less frequently after that. Sam almost never called Dean first unless there was a problem with the weekly money transfers.

For the most part Dean’s life hasn’t changed much from before. He still has school and work, both full time, and he will go to a bar when he’s feeling lonely or horny, or both. But there seem to be people here that are actually interested in him as a person. 

A girl named Charlie, who instantly turned down his flirting by informing him of her disinterest in man folk as partners, decided he was her new best friend and started forcing him to be social.

They share a bunch of classes so Charlie starts by bringing him to a study group she is a part of. Dean isn’t used to really talking about academics or classes with anyone so he stayed mostly quiet for the first few sessions.

It isn’t until someone brings up a similar theme to one in _The Outsiders_ that Dean finally starts to join in.

Slowly Dean starts to expand his group of friends to actually include other people for the first time in his life. It wasn’t something he expected to do, but he can’t find it in himself to be annoyed at all.

University is weird in the sense that Dean assumed he’d be a few years older than everyone there, but there are a lot of people just starting at his age and even older. He starts to interact with a lot of different types of people as he slowly morphs into the kind of person he always wanted to be.

It’s not until Christmas in his first year of university that the bubble in his life breaks just a little.

Charlie, who is an awesome human being, approached him one day asking what he wanted for Christmas. Dean had never been gifted anything on Christmas except for the pendant around his neck that Sam found when he was little.

When he didn’t answer her for a while, he finally decided to tell her his story, at least part of it.

Charlie was horrified that he had a childhood like that, and equally surprised that Dean was such a good person in spite of it. She offered her condolences, but where Dean expected pity Charlie gave him the assurity that she was going to help him figure out what he missed out on when he was younger.

The very first thing she did was bring Dean to a store and have him pick a piece of clothing out entirely for himself and not second hand.

He bought a flannel, it was cheap and kinda rough, but it felt right.

Charlie, and some of her- their- other friends that Dean wanted to open up to, start on a journey to help give Dean the childhood he missed. He is still working full time and doing all of his courses, but they’re a group of students who have all learned to schedule their time accordingly in order to have social lives.

Over the next few months Dean is introduced to laser tag, 3-D movies, and a dozen other things that his friends consider essential to one's childhood even though each of them would have only done about half of them.

Dean ends the year of first experiences by actually dating someone for the first time. Her name is Cassie Robinson and they only got out for about two months but it was a learning experience for both of them and they parted friends.

His second year of university is also the one that should technically finish up his degree, but he didn’t take a full course load during his time before living on campus so he had about a year and a half extra to do after this. Dean doesn’t consider that a bad thing, finishing his degree in five and a half years instead of four isn’t a bad go at it.

Dean isn’t really any closer to knowing what he wants to do with his English degree, but he mentioned to Charlie one night half drunk that he was interested in opening a bar. A good one, a friendly bar very unlike the ones that people like John Winchester frequent.

Charlie then snooped in on his previous courses and figured out which were transferable and which he needed in the future to get a minor in business.

That is how Dean found himself in an entrepreneurship class on his first day. Seated next to a very hot guy with dark sex hair and a freaking trench coat.

Dean didn’t speak to the guy at first, he just observed him for a few days while the guy answered questions under his breath about taxes and money transference. When their first partner project came up, Dean jumped at the opportunity to ask the guy if he’d like to combine his money knowledge with Dean’s people knowledge to begin the first project.

As it turned out, that project was the first of many over the course of that semester in which students were to have the same partners.

That is how Dean met Castiel.

That is also how Dean came to realize that he was starting to fall for Cas.

Classes continued normally with Dean and Cas becoming closer as the semester came to a close with a final project where they would present their business to a group of ‘investors’ for a final grade.

Their business, of course, was the bar Dean had brought up to Charlie the past summer.

Dean and Cas parted ways after the project was complete, they were still waiting on a grade but were confident about it. 

Charlie started to notice that Dean was off and confronted him about what had changed in the past few days to bring him down from where he had been happy. It took a bit of coaxing from Charlie but Dean finally admitted that he wanted to be more than friends with his old business partner.

She started by teasing Dean about not telling her he was into duded, but he never was ashamed of it; he just had never actually thought about guys in a non hook-up way before Cas so he never felt like it was a big deal.

After that she told him that if he wanted Cas he was going to have to go get him, himself.

It took another week of Dean procrastinating and living in his own head before he finally decided to text Cas. It just also happened to be right after they got a 97% on their business, so Dean had a ready made excuse to text him anyways.

In a very hesitant sent text message, Dean thanks Cas for what he contributed to the project and confessed that he felt something between them, and that he hoped Cas was willing to try going on a date with Dean.

Cas agreed.

After that Dean and Cas went on one, two, and many more dates. The two of them clicked with each other in a way that neither of them had clicked with another person before. Charlie met Cas about two months into their relationship and gave it her seal of approval as well.

It was on their six month anniversary when Cas handed him a folded piece of white paper. Dean was concerned at first, but Cas looked excited so Dean opened and read it.

It was an investment offer for their bar.

Their class project that Dean had filed away in the back of his mind as nothing more than the thing that brought him as Cas together was an actual possibility.

When he asked Cas what it meant, Cas explained that he had an uncle who was an investor that was willing to pay for Dean’s dream if he wanted it.

It was Dean’s dream, even if he never actually told anyone that while sober. He didn’t ask how Cas knew, he just kissed him.

Dean moved in with Cas a couple of months later and Sam had stopped taking money out of the account Dean was filling for him, so Dean, after many years, finally stopped putting as much on his plate.

He cut back his hours at work and second semester that year was easier than the first by sheer coincidence.

Dean finally had time to just sit back and relax.

They started talking seriously about the bar in passing moments, most of the ground work was already laid but they were only taking baby steps towards their final goal because they wanted to do it right.

Dean ended up taking two summer courses and a TA position with his classical lit professor to avoid that last half year he almost needed to graduate.

He celebrates his year and eighteen month, because they are that couple, with Cas before he finally graduates university with a Bachelor of English and Business after five years of hard work.

Cas and Dean end up in South Dakota, living not far from one of the few friends of John that Dean actually liked or remembered Bobby. The bar was already in the works by then, they had the building and most of the licenses, and they started to do whatever constriction they could on their own.

They lived off of the savings Dean had and whatever money Cas had from his family of indiscernible wealth was giving him. Cas wanted to be independent though, that’s why he was so eager to split the bar ownership between them.

Cas had a degree in accounting so he handled the money and related things, while Dean was the alcohol, design, and hiring.

They made a good pair, both romantically and as business partners, they made each other better and helped be what the other was lacking.

Charlie joined them a year later, she had an actual job with some IT business in the larger part of the city, but she was eager to help them expand their social media platform and ‘make them famous’.

On the one year anniversary of the bar opening, they shut it down to the public. The bar was extremely successful in its first year and the were even starting to consider expanding in some way, but Dean had a reason sitting in his pocket for them to wait a bit before they did that.

All of their friends, or family as Dean called them were there. Charlie, Bobby, sheriffs Jody and Donna, their bouncers Benny and Garth, some of the bartenders Max, Alicia, and Alex, along with a few others.

After toasts were made and everyone was celebrating on their second glass or bottle of something, Dean pulled Cas aside and led him up the stairs to the roof.

The roof was the only thing they didn’t finish before opening, it was flat and perfect for doing something on top of, but they couldn’t (legally) make it a dining space for the bar. So Dean made it a space for them.

There were plant boxes lining the insides of the half walls, a seating area with a retractable umbrella, and fairy lights lining the entire perimeter. 

Cas called it beautiful but Dean couldn’t with Cas outshining it in every way possible as the faint light bounced off of his body.

Dean softly led Cas to the center of the roof, where there was a spotlight pointed at them. He got down on one knee and pulled the small ring box out of his pocket. He had been wanting to do this for longer than he cared to admit.

Cas, because he knew this was important to Dean, let him ask the question once before kissing him soundly.

When they finally made it back downstairs, the only one to have noticed them missing was also the only one to know what happened up there just minutes ago. Charlie walked right up into his personal space and chose to just silently stare at him questioningly until he said it himself.

Instead, Dean pulled Cas to the center of the bar and grabbed the mic for the karaoke machine he would never admit to buying while very drunk, and announced that he and Cas were getting married.

No one seemed surprised, but then again anyone who met them could see that they were a match made in heaven.

**Epilogue To Tie Up Some Loose Ends**

It was a coincidence, Dean finding out that his father died. He and Cas were just over a year into their engagement and were starting to actually plan the thing when Dean realized that he wanted to reach out to his dad and brother on the off chance that they would even consider being there with him.

A Facebook search found him nothing, but then again he didn’t have a page himself, Dean just frequented photos posted by his family and Charlie made sure that photos of him and Cas littered the bar’s page.

Google was his next attempt. He found records of Sam attending Stanford’s law school, but not much more.

John though. He was much more of an open book after one search. It started with a rap sheet a mile long of charges, most including alcohol in some way, shape, or form.

After that was the obituary. Just his name, birth and death date, and mentioning his lost wife and leaving two sons behind.

It didn’t surprise Dean, but it almost made him feel better that no one had tried to include anything about him being a ‘loving father’ or a ‘good man’, because he wasn’t.

The funeral was a week away; he was being buried in Lawrence beside Mary.

It hadn’t taken more than a few words and handing Cas the Ipad before he agreed to accompany Dean. Charlie wanted to come as well for moral support and Bobby said he was about to tell Dean about it, after an old buddy called him just before Dean did.

Together the four of them traveled down to Kansas in two cars. Dean thought it would be weird to make Charlie and Bobby travel together, but Charlie insisted they were friends and Bobby said she was like a daughter to him, just like Dean and Cas were sons to him.

Dean had very few memories of Lawrence, but the most vivid one brought him to an old house on the same street as the remains of his first home. Cas was standing behind him when Missouri opened the door, she pulled Dean into a hug and proclaimed that she had been waiting for him to visit during all of the years since he left, without even having to ask his name.

Dean just blushed, and hugged her back.

Eventually she let go and Dean introduced Cas to her as his fiance. Missouri just smiled knowingly and led the two of them inside her house.

It was great to catch up with her, Dean couldn’t remember much of his time with her but she told him stories about Mary and when he was a kid that he had no other way of ever hearing. They left that evening with smiles on their faces. She made Dean promise to visit her again, even if they saw each other the following day.

Dean was dressed in his fancy suit, as opposed to the casual one, for the funeral the following day. It wasn’t for John, it was for him to show his dad that he is successful and happy in spite of him.

Maybe a little because of the way Cas looks at him when he wears it. Maybe.

There is no church planned, just a procession with the casket and the eulogy, before John Winchester was lowered into the ground forever more.

Dean decided not to interrupt the group of men who knew John before he became the person he died as, and let them carry their old friend to his final resting place. So he positioned himself, and the rest of his merry little group, near the far edge of the grave site.

It was odd watching a box Dean knew contained his fathers body be placed over a contraption that would eventually lower him into his grave. He was neither sad nor happy to watch it happen.

Indifferent. That is what he had become towards his father over the years.

Some people spoke, most Dean knew hadn’t actually spoken to John since before Mary died. They spoke of courage and strength, but no one brought up love.

Maybe John had been incapable of it all along.

When they were done speaking the last soldier from John’s company came forward to give the folded flag to whomever the closest relative of the deceased was. Dean squeezed Cas’ hand once and got twin shoulder pats from Charlie and Bobby before stepping forward.

At the same time as Sam did from the exact opposite side of the site.

They walked forward and took the flag together. People seemed confused, some shocked even, but the brothers just walked straight down the path away from the grave together.

Sam dropped his hold on the flag first and wrapped Dean in a hug. Dean hugged his very tall, little brother back.

Neither of them said anything as Cas, Charlie, Bobby, and a softly smiling brunette approached them. 

This was the start of them regrowing their relationship, as brothers and as friends.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Van'ty for Beta-ing, tomorrow we die like students!
> 
> This was supposed to be short, writing 7k words in five hours is not the best method lol, which is probably why this has no actual speaking in it.
> 
> Please leave a comment or a kudos, I require them to function now.


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